Translation to Esperanto: does anybody need it?

/e/OS Smartphone Operating System
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Hello.
A couple of days ago I emailed E foundation, but didn’t receive the answer, so I decided to write on the forum.

Well, between the languages that I speak there is Esperanto, the most successful artificial language that was created for international communication. I’m one of the people who prefer to use software in Esperanto; I can do it on my desktop (with Linux) but there is no smartphone OS available in this language. Although some software (like K9, OSMand and some else) is already translated.

I could make a translation plus answer to people’s questions in the forum; but I don’t know is E foundation is interested in that. So, I’ll ask here: would it be good to have the smartphone OS available in one more language, even if it’s not a natural language? Hope somebody will be interested.

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As a speaker of an international language myself, I would love to see them being implemented but truth of the matter is that they aren’t very popular for a number of reasons. I suppose you could try to translate the OS to Esperanto but it would be a lot of work and few if any might use it.

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Well, the question is: how can I participate? Can I get .po-files, or what is the format of localization? Is it possible to open an Esperanto-forum here? I understand that there will be VERY few users, but why not? So, I’m willing to participate, but how can I do it?

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Hi, I want to make clear that the nature of /e/ makes it very “compatible” with the addition
of new languages or variants of languages.

However, /e/ is a mix of hundreds of components, some of them we fork to modify them, some other we don’t fork (yet). Adding support for a new language to each part of the project (OS, apps, online services, project websites…) would force us to fork all projects and maintain compatibility with upstream.

Plus, the project is still very young, with limited resources, and therefore I cannot have the core team spend time on new language support at the moment.

So my answer at the moment is:

  • wait until we grow enough to offer you options to work on translations
  • in the meantime, offer to contribute upstream your language into the various projects that are part of /e/ (and therefore these translations will naturally be integrated in /e/)

Of course you can also fork everything, as we are an open source project, but this is another story.

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